5

Rita has now made it to the top of the scale: Category 5.

Am I the only one who's starting to freak out just a little bit? I'm not talking about this one single hurricane and what it might do to Texas; I mean freak out in a much broader sense, like maybe we've really f*cked something up with the whole damn planet? With Katrina you could at least still make the argument that it wasn't a symptom of global warming. Strong hurricanes, after all, do happen. Camille was stronger, as was Andrew, and an unnamed storm that hit the Florida Keys in 1935 ("Isaac's Storm" of 1900 was a category 4). And isn't that really the point? That devastating hurricanes strike this country so rarely In fact, between 1900 and 2000, there were only 15 category 4/5 storms that actually hit the U.S.

So to have a second massive storm this soon after Katrina.... Well, does that strike anyone else as w-a-a-a-y out of the norm and more than just a bit alarming?

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm going outside to plant a tree.